 |
 |
I am also in need of other writings, on the 'transformative' quality of cinema, that are useful to put alongside Benjamin. ________________________________________________________________________ _ Among several topnotch Benjaminian commentaries try Friedberg, Anne (1993), Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern, University of California Press, Berkeley. Andrew, Dudley (ed) (1997), The Image in Dispute: Art and Cinema in the Age of Photography, University of Texas Press, Austin. Charney, Leo and Vanessa R Schwartz (eds) (1995), Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life, University of Californa Press, Berkeley CA. and the essay by Miriam Hansen on 'The Blue Flower in the land of technology' (her re-translation of the 'orchid' reference in section XI) which appeared in New german Critique about a decde ago. The best general commentary on Benujamin in English is, for my money, Buck-Morss, Susan (1989), The Dialectics of Seeing : Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. There are literally dozens of essays reconfiguring benjamin's title for 'electronic reproduction', which I believe has relevance for at least some of Wenders' later work. Krauss Rosalind E. (1993), The Optical Unconscious, MIT Press, Cambridge MA. is an art-historical re-visitation of surrealism, a favourite topic of Benjamin's, drawing on the 'unconscious optics' proposal, which is also worth a look. In recent months I've also found Kracauer's essays in The Mass ornament instructive in the extreme as a different reading of the transformational properties of film. On a wholly different tack, it is worth chasing the Catholic phenomenological tradition, from Teilhard de Chardin towards, on the one hand, Jacques Ellul and Andre Bazin, and on the other into McLuhan and Walter J Ong, both trajectories coming together again in the work of Paul Virilio. The French wild card in this is merleau-Ponty (see Vivian Sobchack's (1992), The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience, Princeton University Press, Princeton.); the North American is caught up in the history-of-civilizations workj of Harold J Innis (Innis, Harold A (1951), The Bias of Communication, University of Toronto Press, Toronto. Innis, Harold A (1972), Empire and Communications (revised by Mary Q Innis), University of Toronto Press, Toronto.; Innis has a wonderful commentator in Jody Berland. Of about the same generation as Wenders, Friedrich Kittler's stuff is very well worth reading, in this context especially Kittler, Friedrich A (1999a), Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans and intro Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz, Stanford University Press, Stanford. (The intro is also available as Kittler, Friedrich (1987), 'Gramophone, Film, Typewriter', trans Dorothe von Mücke, in October n.41, Summer, 101-118. and in Kittler, Friedrich A (1997), Literature, Media, Information Systems: Essays ed and intro John Johnston, G+B Arts International, Amsterdam. Finally I have been very impressed by recent essays in scattered publications by Jonathan Beller, (highly) critical appropriations of Deleuze. This of course leads you into the hotly defended expert territory of the Deleuzeans, so might not be what you want to be doing. hope this helps a little sean -- Sean Cubitt Professor of Screen and Media Studies, University of Waikato, Private Bag 3105, Hamilton, New Zealand T/F +64 (0)7 838 4543 http://www.waikato.ac.nz/film http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/digita http://www.dundee.ac.uk/people/sean/welcome.html